Church in Unterach

Church in Unterach (1916) is one of Klimt's Attersee-region architectural landscapes, capturing the parish church of Unterach am Attersee as it appeared from across or along the lake shore. Klimt painted the Attersee region's villages and churches alongside his pure landscape studies of forests and water, treating the vernacular architecture of the Salzkammergut with the same all-over painterly attention he brought to natural subjects. The spire and white plaster walls of a lakeside church appear in multiple Klimt canvases from different angles and seasons, suggesting he approached these architectural motifs as he approached the apple tree or the forest: as a formal problem to be worked through in variations. The 1916 dating places this work in Klimt's final Attersee summers — he did not return to the lake after 1916. The architectural landscape allowed Klimt to introduce geometric regularity into the all-over organic complexity of his forest paintings, creating the same tension between the made and the grown that characterises his farmhouse and garden subjects. The work's relative obscurity compared to the Golden Phase figure paintings should not obscure its quality: the Attersee landscapes are among the most sustained and formally rigorous painting projects of early twentieth-century European art.

Oil on canvas in Klimt's square format with characteristic all-over treatment. The church's white tower and body are rendered in relatively clean, light paint that creates a tonal focal point within the surrounding chromatic density. Reflections in lake water, if present, are handled with horizontal strokes that contrast with the vertical marks of the church wall.